Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: We investigate the mechanisms that allow people to success-fully understand language given noise in the world and in their own perceptual inputs. We address two parts of this ques-tion. First, what knowledge do people use to make sense of language inputs that may have been corrupted? Second, how much of this knowledge is used while people are processing sentences? We conduct a sentence production experiment and an on-line reading experiment in order to answer these ques-tions. Both experiments provide evidence that syntactic knowl-edge can drive top-down reinterpretations of word identities, as well as syntactic reanalyses that are incompatible with people’s language input. In addition, Experiment 2 provides evidence that this knowledge is deployed on-line, as people process sen-tences.
Authors: Leon Bergen, Roger Lévy, Edward Gibson
Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2406070205